The depression of the nineties, including the Panic of 1893, has been a subject of great interest for economic historians, as well as for analysts of the business cycle. Coming at the climax of the bitter struggle over the gold standard, this crisis has usually been explained in polemical or oversimplified terms. Despite its significance, there is no published work dealing exclusively with the depression other than W. J. Lauck's The Causes of the Panic of 1893, which treats only the early phases of the crisis. Most explanations of the depression continue to reflect strongly those advanced as plausible during die period itself, with a few qualifications added as the result of the availability of some quantitative data and furdier reflection. Recent construction of additional quantitative series makes possible a more systematic analysis of the economic factors which interacted to precipitate a depression of major proportions.

There is impressive evidence that wealthy peasants contributed significantly to the success of the Meiji Restoration, the political revolution that launched Japan on her career of modernization. These rural capitalists, for such they were, helped to give the revolution direction as well as power. How otherwise is one to account for a government dominated by samurai, the elite carriers of tradition, following policies that did great violence to Japan's past and destroyed the privileged status of the warrior class? But if the influence of the representatives of rural wealth was so strong, why did they consent to a clique of warriors holding political power almost as a private prerogative for a generation after the Restoration? Despite the demand for a share in power in the eighties, they did consent and weakly accepted the Meiji constitution which sanctified authoritarian government.

The thesis that long-term price movements in medieval and early modern periods were the results of changes in the supply of precious metals has been questioned by a number of historians who believe that fluctuations in population provide a more fundamental explanation. These men point out that if changes in the supply of money were primarily responsible, the secular rise and fall of prices would have been approximately the same for all commodities. Actually, agricultural prices rose and fell faster and more sharply than did the prices of industrial goods. It is claimed that these price changes and the lack of synchronization between them can be satisfactorily explained by changes in the size of population: